Dr Sofia Nivarti
- Associate Professor of Architecture
- Fellow and College Lecturer in Architecture, St John’s College
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About
A native of Jyväskylä, Finland, Dr Sofia Nivarti trained as an architect at the University of Cambridge and the Yale School of Architecture. She practiced architecture in Boston, MA, with a focus on educational and industrial buildings, before returning to Cambridge to undertake a PhD in architectural history. At Yale, she held the Edward P. Bass Scholarship in Architecture, and at Cambridge, a Gates Cambridge PhD Scholarship. Dr Nivarti is a Fellow and College Lecturer at St John's College, and Director of Studies in Architecture at St John's and Sidney Sussex Colleges.
Research
Dr Nivarti’s specialism is modern architecture. She is an internationally renowned Aalto scholar, with expertise in the critical analysis of the architecture, urbanism, design and thought of Finnish modernists Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto and their associates. Her other research interests lie in the histories and theories of modern architecture, Indigenous architectures, architectural criticism, and architectural pedagogies for children. She is currently engaged in two main research projects, one on the post-construction ‘afterlives’ of Aalto buildings, and the other on contested notions of contemporaneity in Sámi public buildings.
Informing and informed by her academic research, Nivarti is also actively engaged in curating architecture. Major exhibitions include Città dei Morti—City of the Dead at the Alvar Aalto Museum (2015) and, most recently, Alvar Aalto in Deutschland: Gezeichnete Moderne/Alvar Aalto in Germany: Drawing Modernism at the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin (2023). She also served as academic advisor and presenter for the feature-length documentary film AALTO (dir. Virpi Suutari, 2020).
Publications
Selected publications
Teaching and supervision
Dr Nivarti lectures and supervises widely across the Architecture and Design Triposes, particularly for historical-theoretical papers, and supervises MArch and MAUS students. She also teaches research methods to graduate students and serves as a tutor and examiner for the MSt Apprenticeship in Architecture. She is Chair of Examiners for Part IA Architecture and Design. Dr Nivarti welcomes applications from prospective graduate students, including PhD students, interested in any aspect of the history, theory and/or criticism of modern architecture, broadly understood.